No Chris Paul again, no Matt Barnes. Add Rudy Gay. It’s tough to win when you give the opponent their best player and the Clippers don’t have their best player and arguably their third most important player. Any team losing that much talent is going to struggle. Nothing left but to take out the Canadian frustrations on Beantown.

No off ball = an off night
The biggest threats are sometimes the ones you can’t see. We know about the subtle ballhandling brilliance of Chris Paul and the openings he creates for Blake Griffin and the “bump” he gives shooters. If you want to attribute the Clippers 3-for-19 perimeter shooting to that, you won’t hear an awful lot of complaints from me. Honestly though, what may have hurt the floor spacing even more tonight than the absence of Chris Paul was the absence of Matt Barnes.

It’s not because Barnes is this otherworldly perimeter shooter — he’s league average — but his ability to balance the floor, move to the open space and cut at just the right time was sorely missed. On Blake Griffin’s post opportunities, sometimes you’d find four Clippers inexplicably in the paint, and off-ball movement is only valuable when it has a purpose and when it meshes with what the other four guys on the floor are doing. Eric Bledsoe and Willie Green actually ran into each other in the middle of the paint while Griffin had the ball on one particular possession. That sort of thing can’t happen, but it did far too often.- DJ Foster